Barnes and Noble's Nook HD, HD+ Coming After Amazon this October

Today, Barnes & Noble announced its Nook HD (7") and HD+ (9") tablets, available for pre-order today and shipping in late October. They're good-looking pieces of hardware, but we're still betting gamers and tech-heads will find them too limited. Here's a run-down of what's good, bad, and root-worthy about B&N's Kindle-killers.

The Good

At 1440 x 900, the 7-inch Nook HD has the highest resolution of any 7-inch tablet. And with a whopping 256ppi, the 9-inch HD+ (1920 x 1280) comes nipping at the retina iPad's 264ppi. Both displays are just gorgeous, with noticeably better contrast than the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire HD.

Oh, and their OMAP 4470 processors, clocked at 1.3 and 1.5 GHz respectively, should be able to handle resource intensive games just fine.

Does that mean they'll be priced like the iPad? Not even close: The 8GB Nook HD will sell for $200; the 16GB HD+ for $270. $30 lets you double your storage on either tablet, and if you want even more they both have microSD slots.

Despite its guts, the 7" Nook HD weighs 20% less than the already-super-light Kindle Fire HD. And it won't have lock-screen ads like Amazon's tablets; in our book (tee-hee), that's definitely a plus.

The Bad

Neither Nook HD has a camera. Skype capability might have been nice, but we're willing to let this one go on a $200 tablet. The bigger hardware issue is the proprietary plug - something only Apple seems able to get away with these days. If you really want to output an HDMI signal from it, you can buy a $40 adapter, but on Amazon's new tablets that comes stock.

And while the tablets are both nice and slim, the bezels surrounding their screens seem bigger than necessary.

The Root-Worthy

Interested in playing games on a shiny new Nook HD? Well, we hope you like Angry Birds. In all fairness, the Nook store has hundreds of apps, certainly more than we have space to list here; but compare that with the hundreds ofthousands in Apple's App Store or Google Play.

Yes, the Nook HDs will run a version of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). But (as on all the Kindle Fires) the interface is unrecognizable as Android, and users won't have access to the Play Store. In case you were wondering, that's how B&N can afford to sell such a great tablet at this price: they're gambling that content sales to drive profits.

And while that's frustrating for gamers, it makes sense for B&N's target demographic: families. Plenty of folks don't want any games more hardcore than Words With Friends on a device they'll use for reading, web-browsing and watching videos.

If you're comfortable at the command-line and don't mind voiding your warranty though, we're betting it won't be too difficult to root it for a clean install of ICS. Then we might see what that OMAP chip is really capable of.

Is the Nook HD's great display enough to make it the tablet to beat? Or is it just an expensive keychain? Let us know in the comments.

Jon Fox is a Seattle hipster who loves polar bears and climbing trees. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.